Two-timescale Extragradient for Finding Local Minimax Points

Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2024 (ICLR 2024) Conference

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Jiseok Chae, Kyuwon Kim, Donghwan Kim

Abstract

Minimax problems are notoriously challenging to optimize. However, we present that the two-timescale extragradient method can be a viable solution. By utilizing dynamical systems theory, we show that it converges to points that satisfy the second-order necessary condition of local minimax points, under mild conditions that the two-timescale gradient descent ascent fails to work. This work provably improves upon all previous results on finding local minimax points, by eliminating a crucial assumption that the Hessian with respect to the maximization variable is nondegenerate.